


Negative Spaces

by Lys ap Adin (lysapadin)



Series: A Collection of Shiro Clones Is a Terrible Thing to Waste [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Existential Angst, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, POV Second Person, and I am taking Shiro's army of clones with me, i will face canon and walk backwards into hell, sorry about the second person thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-08-29 10:08:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16742011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lysapadin/pseuds/Lys%20ap%20Adin
Summary: What does it mean to be the clone of a man like Takashi Shirogane?Here are some things you don't have: A prosthetic where your right hand and arm should be; a scar crossing the bridge of your nose; any hair that has been stripped of color by quintessence; a patchwork of scars across your skin, the roadmap to your nightmares; any real right to those nightmares.





	Negative Spaces

**Author's Note:**

> 2296 words, second person pov (sorry), certainly not canon compliant. For something that was supposed to have been smutty clonecest, there is a distinct lack of smut and a lot of existential angst going on here.

Here are some things you don't have:

  * A prosthetic where your right hand and arm should be
  * A scar crossing the bridge of your nose
  * Any hair that has been stripped of color by quintessence
  * A patchwork of scars across your skin, the roadmap to your nightmares
  * Any real right to those nightmares



 

 

There are three of you. 

No, there are more of you than that. There were a hundred and five of you once the facility had been catalogued in full, and as far as anyone can tell from the witch's notes, it was the only such facility she had.

You hope that it was the only facility she had. You hope that there are only a hundred and five of you, but the truth is stark: the universe is large, and the witch is so very cunning. There could be more of you out there. You can't be sure there aren't.

But there were a hundred and five of you. A hundred and six if you count him, but sometimes you don't. He's real—closer to real. He's lived free of glass tubes, lived as though the memories he carries were truly his, has experiences that _are_ his. He's known, however briefly, what it is to be real. So you don't always count him as one of you.

You have always known that you are a clone. A copy.

 

 

Here are some things you've never done:

  * Watched the sun rise or set over the Pacific 
  * Piloted a craft through the exosphere into space
  * Killed to survive in the arena
  * Held a bayard
  * Formed Voltron



 

 

Of the hundred and five of you, twenty-six never opened their eyes. They're shells, as far as anyone is able to determine. Braindead, to one way of thinking. The witch was harvesting quintessence from them, stripping it from them again and again. 

Now the Voltron Coalition knows where that strange quintessence was coming from, at least.

Forty-three of you weren't even viable outside the pods. When they opened some of the pods, the bodies inside did not open their eyes. Their hearts did not pump, and their lungs never drew breath. They were inert. You don't say they were dead, because you don't think they were ever alive to begin with. Perhaps the witch's process wasn't perfect, or perhaps these forty-three simply had their quintessence stripped away too many times. No one is really sure.

Sometimes you think they were the lucky ones.

There are only twenty-five of the ones who breathe but don't live now. The real you, the original you—once they determined that there wasn't a soul in those twenty-six, no way they would ever open their eyes and live, well. He was a soul without a body. By some calculations, it only made sense. So he wears that twenty-sixth body, unmarred and whole, hair the color of bone from the quintessence that bathed him, them, when the princess transferred him from one container to the other.

The other twenty-five remain in their pods. The princess thinks that there might be a way to generate a soul for them, somehow. Someday. 

So they sleep. Maybe someday they will wake. 

 

 

Here's a thing you don't know: what purpose do you serve when the universe already has one Takashi Shirogane in it?

 

 

That leaves thirty-six. There are the three of you, and then there are the other thirty-three. When their pods were opened, they opened their eyes and reacted to the presence of others, but it was not as a rational adult human being. They are like children, in a way, in that every experience is new to them.

From the witch's notes, it seems these were the intermediate stage—that she held them in reserve, ready to receive the template of Takashi Shirogane's memories that she had tweaked to her own ends as needed.

But she hadn't gotten that far.

They're living on Olkari now, the thirty-three of them, soaking in new experiences and knowledge at an impressive rate. They know what they are—clones—but from what you hear, it doesn't mean much to them. Why should it? They're their own people, for all that they share identical DNA, and that's that.

You envy them very much.

 

 

Here are some things you will never be called:

  * Takashi in your mother's tones
  * Lieutenant Shirogane
  * Champion
  * Black paladin
  * Shiro, the way only Keith can say it, rounding the syllables into something warm and sweet



 

 

There are three of you. There were four before the witch activated one of you, took his arm and the color from his forelock, scarred his face and body, and sent him to destroy Voltron. Her records show that there were a fifth and a sixth, but they didn't survive their escape attempts—what they would have thought were their escape attempts. Her notes don't say what went wrong and only betray irritation over the delay to the next phase of Operation Kuron. Why would she care? She had spares, and one of you made it in the end.

So you don't know where or how they died, whether they were shot down by drone sentries and spaced through an airlock or obliterated in a stolen Galra fighter or dead on some unknown planet—you don't know, though you can imagine all the possibilities all too well, can imagine what they must have felt at the end, knowing that it was all in vain, that they were going to die without ever seeing their team again. They never knew they weren't real. They could only die with all their regrets, with no one to mourn them.

You mourn them, these lost brothers. You don't know where they rest, if they rest, or if their shadow souls linger on, but you have a shrine for them in your quarters that is for the two of them where you light incense for them and pay your respects. Sometimes you discuss telling your fourth, Ryou as he calls himself now, about it, but so far you haven't. They were his brothers, too, but he succeeded where they did not and bears his own burden of grief in consequence. You think he probably needs to find his own way to make peace with that.

That's all any of you can do.

 

 

Here are some things that you have been called:

  * Things One, Two, and Three (only once, by Pidge, who heard about it from Keith, your original, and a bit surprisingly, Lance) 
  * The clones (never to your face and never by the three above, to the best of your knowledge) 
  * The triplets
  * The trio
  * "Hey, um… which one are you again?" 
  * Little brother (your original is… has achieved a state of enviable detachment and acceptance, and merely says that being dead for a year and some didn't leave him much else to do but cultivate his peace of mind) 
  * Hikaru, Mamoru, and Shizuka



 

 

The three of you chose your own names. Ryou had already laid claim to your original's paternal grandfather's name by the time you came out of the pods, and it took you some time to work through the shock of waking up after dying (thinking you had died) to find that you were one of many copies of the man all your memories insist that you are.

Taking the name of your original's maternal grandfather seemed reasonable, so one of you became Hikaru. Given 光, Shizuka, 静, and Mamoru, 守, make sense. You don't know whether anyone other than Ryou and your original know what is behind those choices, but you think Keith might, if the faint crease of his eyebrows when you announced your choices is any indication. But he's never said anything about it.

 

 

Here's something you know that no one else does: sometimes you're Hikaru and sometimes you're Shizuka and sometimes you're Mamoru. 

 

 

The thing is, until they cracked the pods open, you were all the same person, bearing identical memories of identical experiences that none of you actually lived through. A handful of months of real experiences haven't been enough to alter that fundamental fact, and the cosmetic trifles of hair and clothes are just that—cosmetic. Maybe, if you live long enough, if you get the chance to split up and take it (a big if), that will change.

For now, the you who is being Hikaru does his best to be optimistic and the you being Shizuka clings to the kind of calm your original displays so effortlessly and the you being Mamoru looks after the others. 

Who else is going to do it?

 

 

Here is who else is going to look after you:

  * Lance
  * Your original
  * Ryou
  * The rest of your team—the rest of the paladins
  * Keith



 

 

Keith. 

Your original knew before he died—knew before the moment during Keith's trial for the Blade of Marmora when Kolivan uttered the words "Your friend desperately wants to see you." When you scour your—his—memories, you think he knew when he woke up in a run-down shack in the Arizona desert and saw Keith watching him, joy lighting his face even more brightly than the sunrise. He knew, or had a very good suspicion, and it terrified him. Terrifies you.

You've known love before, or know his memories of love, and as far as you can tell the witch never meddled with any of those memories. You know the bittersweetness of your original's first love, the passing short-lived flames of his adolescent infatuations, and the deeper, enduring warmth of real love, what you'd thought—he'd thought—he and Adam had built together.

They're all pallid flickers of candle light compared to the blazing way Keith loves you.

 _You_. All three of you, and Ryou, and your original. He loves all of you with equal intensity, with the whole of his being, undiminished and undimmed by the fact that only one of you can claim that he is the real Takashi Shirogane or by the fact that Ryou nearly killed him under the witch's command or by the fact that the three of you are nothing more than bewildered copies of an original. You would think that there would be some necessary diffusion—there are five of you!—but no. There's not. You think that Keith has enough of that fierce love in him for fifteen of you. For fifty of you. For all one hundred and eight of you, if all of you had survived, if the pods had spat out a hundred and eight identical copies of Takashi Shirogane.

So yes. It terrifies you to be loved liked this. You remember your original's relief that Keith hedged during his trial, calling your original his brother. There certainly is some of that between you—him—and Keith, the memory of the prodigy you knew before leaving for Kerberos, and it served well enough as a fig leaf for everything else.

 

 

Here is a thing that you know that you don't think anyone, even your original, has told Keith: Adam's ultimatum was devasting, yes, of course it was devastating. Marrying him had been a serious possibility you—your original was considering. And yet it was also a relief to be set free. Your condition was chronic, potentially terminal, but it was _yours_. Maybe you _were_ trying to prove that you were more than your diagnosis, but that was your choice to make, your priority to choose.

You think you first fell a little in love with Keith Kogane when he didn't discourage you from that choice.

 

 

Him. When Keith didn't discourage _him_ from that choice.

 

 

Here is something you don't think any of you really know how to process: your bodies are physically perfect, aside from the incidental scarring and Ryou's missing arm. Whatever the witch had planned for you, she hadn't wanted you dying before she was done with you. 

Even your original has trouble being zen about the enormity of that careless boon.

 

 

On the other hand, the look on Keith's face after the results of your physicals had been checked and double-checked and confirmed to be true will stay with you. He doesn't make much of it, doesn't make _anything_ of it, but Keith's story is a story of loss, of losing people again and again and again. You've been that loss for more than your fair share and you don't want to be that to him ever again.

Now, thanks to the witch, at least you can be sure that you won't, not due to the betrayal of your own muscles and nerves. 

You would never have known that the fear of that very thing had weighed on Keith at all if you hadn't seen the way his whole being relaxed in sudden, subtle relief at the news, hadn't seen the sudden glow of his joy.

You hate to be grateful to the witch for anything, and yet—

And yet, for this one thing, you are. All of you are.

 

 

Here is the truth, as far as you're concerned: you don't know what purpose you serve or whether you'll ever feel like you are real people of your own instead of copies of a man you think is inimitable. You don't understand how Keith's heart can be large enough to hold all of you the effortless way that it does. You don't know what you could ever do to deserve any of this when you've only ever _really_ existed for a handful of months. 

But you know that you will spend the rest of your lives, which may be very long indeed, doing your utmost to be worthy of these things (even if Keith and your original insist that you are already, have always been, worthy). 

And that, you think, might be just enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are always lovely!


End file.
